Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
"In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: 'before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.' Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero's long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota: unknown lands where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. With a new introduction by Donna Haraway, the eminent cyberfeminist, author of the revolutionary A Cyborg Manifesto and most recently, Staying with the Trouble and Manifestly Haraway. With images by Lee Bul, a leading South Korean feminist artist who had a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 2018."--Publisher description.
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0recommend
4mentions
4people
2020–2026years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Warning: opening a can of worms. Ann Blair is a great source on general, but there are so many facets to this topic here's a list that I have read or am going to read.
* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen * The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin * Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair * Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann * Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design * Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard M Kanare * Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski * A System for Writing by Bob Doto * Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte * Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan * Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini * The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson * How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens * Filing and Database Systems by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle, Judith Scharle Greene * Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern * The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen * The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul * Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari * Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo * Filing by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle * How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess * A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham * The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll * The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles * Chance Particulars by Sara Mansfield Taber, Maud Taber-Thomas * The Great Mental Models Volume 1- General Thinking Concepts by Parrish, Shane; Beaubien, Rhiannon * The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales * Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper Articulating design decisions by Tom Greever The Card System at the Office by J Kaiser * Systematic Indexing by J Kaiser * Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet * Magic and hypersystems : constructing the information-sharing library by Harold Billings. * The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information by George A. Miller * The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither * The Oxford Handbook of Expertise * Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc Doumont * Applied Secretarial Practice by Rupert P. Sorelle and John Robert Gregg * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * What is a Document by Michael Buckland * The Commonplace Book by Ann Blair * Make Better Documents by Anil Dash * A Core Calculus for Documents by Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi * The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams * Information by Anthony Grafton * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * Files: Law and Media Technology by Cornelia Vismann * Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge by Cyrille Martraire * Living in Information by Jorge Arango * How to Write a Technical Paper: Structure and Style of the Epitome of your Research† by Georgios Varsamopoulos * Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by JoAnn T. Hackos * Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango * Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James (jamesg.blog)
- For more context, quoting from the project page:
> Riffing on Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, this presents a primordial vision of computation in which programs are written as a list of changes in the content of a bag, and programming can be done entirely without the need for textual representations.
uxn was also previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41777995
For additional context, hundredrabbits are the incredibly cool artist collective with a philosophy of low-tech computing solutions for a more resilient future - see their post "Working off-grid efficiently", discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723819
- While it is possible to hamfist several narratives to growing tension and resolution, we know of the existence of Jo-ha-kyū and Scandanavian storytelling structure (in which multiple characters are presented with a 'red thread', often in the form of a common mythology, tying them together) among several several others.
This notion was critiqued decades ago, as in Ursula Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory Of Fiction [0] which itself references even earlier work that critiques this idea of a universal structure of tension/climax/resolution.
0. http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-...
- An alternate approach: the Carrier Bag theory of fiction by Ursula Le Guin, which argues (gently) against "the hero's desires" and the Campbellian monomyth: https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=eJj4RlFKWCoC&lpg=PA149&o...
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